It was almost exactly eight years ago when I teamed up with a few friends, a few people I barely knew, and several I didn’t know at all, to write, shoot and edit an original short film in approximately 48 hours. Although I’d been dabbling in TV and film writing as well as short-form videos (documentary and, um, whatever nonsense I was putting on YouTube), the 2011 48 Hour Film Project was my first real foray into filmmaking, and immediately I fell in love.
Almost none of us working on that film knew what we were doing at the time–a few folks were still learning to use the video functions of their then-new Canon 5D Mark II cameras literally on set–but we formed a very quick bond that comes from creating something together under pressure in such a compressed time frame. It was intense, it was fun, it was a hell of a learning experience. And I wanted to do it again.
Well, I didn’t expect it to take almost a decade, but finally, this weekend I dove back into the weekend warrior filmmaking experience. This time, it was with a whole gang of people I’d never met before to create a five-minute short film for the AT&T Create-a-thon Invitational. Interestingly, it was with a cast and crew about the same size as our 2011 48 Hour team (just over a dozen), but this being the Los Angeles edition, the group was a mix of pros and aspiring filmmakers, so the shoot was much more professional. However, it was still crazy stressful but fun as heck, and again, bonds were formed very quickly.
And, once again, I was handling editing the film, which meant I was sweating bullets from about 6:30 a.m. until 2:51 p.m. Sunday, which is how long it took me to edit, re-edit, color, sound mix, output, and upload our film–turning it in nine minutes before the (extended) 3 p.m. deadline. This was after being awake about 20 hours the day before (we had a 6 a.m. call time in Hollywood, which is about a 45 minute drive from my house with no traffic), so I was running on a total of maybe nine hours sleep over two days. It’s kind of surprising the version of the film that screened Sunday night at Cross Campus in downtown L.A. turned out as well as it did (except for a blank frame and an in-shot boom mic that the audience hopefully didn’t notice).
Anyway, here’s a slightly improved version of what was screened at the competition: Namaste.
https://youtu.be/0C7xTFV0sKY
We were truly blessed by a great cast who immediately slipped into characters and improvised most of their parts (particularly the “rituals” in the middle). But they had a great, funny script to work from, co-written by two young women, Juliette Calderon and Sandi Wright, the former of which also directed the film–her first time doing so–and the latter who also managed the whole production. Everyone showed up on time, put in a lot of hard work, took on whatever roles were required, and did all of it with a smile, even as we dealt with a lot of obstacles.
For example, we only had the main filming location from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. It took us about two hours to load in and set up for the first scene. We lost one of our actors, cutting down the ladies on-screen from four to three, and throwing out that role. One of those actors had to leave by 11:45, so we improvised a scene where she finds an excuse to leave–which was perfectly in character. In the middle of the shoot, we learned that we didn’t have the right equipment to read the camera storage media being used, so we lost about 45 minutes of shooting time while scrambling for a solution (all the memory cards we had were full–or so we thought). Because of this, we couldn’t get all the coverage we wanted before rushing to wrap and return the location to the way we found it by 1 p.m. But we got most of what we needed, moved to a side street to shoot the outdoor scenes, and decompressed over Thai food by 3 p.m.
The film is five minutes because that was the limit for the competition (which we did not win, but it got a lot of laughs and applause at the screening, which is good enough for me), but my original edit was closer to seven minutes, and I’ve been talking with the creative team about possibly doing a less restrictive edit that restores a lot of the cut jokes and potentially could be shown to more audiences. But that remains to be seen.
In the meantime, there’s that other movie I have to get back to finishing writing and editing (and this weekend, filming). I hear there are people waiting for that…